


The Doug Eiffel Reunion Tour

by deliverusfromsburb



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Discussion of medical procedures and consent, Doug chats with his past self, Gen, Hera is having a bad time, Jacobi is mentioned but doesn't merit a character tag, Memory Loss, Minkowski and Lovelace pursue unconventional grieving strategies, Miranda is just fine thank you very much, Post-Canon, Self-Hatred, traumatic memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:48:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28317009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliverusfromsburb/pseuds/deliverusfromsburb
Summary: It's a few weeks into their trip back to Earth, and Doug Eiffel is remembering things.He wishes that he wasn't.Plus, xenophlebotomy, Donna Noble, revenge lists, and the dubious legality of bread in spaceflight.
Relationships: Doug Eiffel & Hera, Doug Eiffel & Miranda Pryce
Comments: 6
Kudos: 40





	The Doug Eiffel Reunion Tour

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes while writing a fic your friend requested as a present, you end up writing something completely different and then scrolling through the dialog for ages because you actually need a title now.  
> Anyway, Wolf 359 is a Christmas podcast in the same way that Die Hard is a Christmas movie, so getting this formatted was a totally valid use of my morning.

Doug was born on a space station a few minutes away from crashing into a star.

Not literally. Literally, he was born on Earth (Boston, Massachusetts; Hera tells him). But as far as he remembers? Hello world, smack into the middle of a bunch of people’s worst day of their lives, or one of them. Part of why it was the worst day of a bunch of people’s lives.

Woohoo.

They try to be nice about it. Well, Renée and Isabel and Hera do. He hasn’t seen the other guy, Jacobi, all that much after he’d shown up on the station looking like he’d been chewed up and spat out and gone “what the _hell_ ” when Doug asked him who he was. He does catch him floating near the comms room sometimes when he’s listening to recordings with Alana Maxwell in them, but he’s gotten the impression he shouldn’t comment.

Anyway, the others try to be nice. And it’s annoying, to have to ask for directions all the time and relearn how to use a space toilet and to not know what anyone’s talking about. The velvet glove treatment makes it worse, when he knows what they’re really thinking.

A few weeks into this, Doug has the dream.

It’s not the first time he’s dreamed, but the other dreams are… broken. People he’s never met, places he’s never been, images he doesn’t recognize, all flashing and disappearing without connecting to anything bigger. Maybe it’s a leftover of whatever the last guy to use this body did to his head.

He does ask Miranda about it. She’s not popular with anyone else, even if the others don’t like to talk about it. They’re friendlier to him, and welcoming, and polite, and they wish he didn’t exist just as much. But, you know. In a friendly, welcoming, polite kind of way.

Basically, he can relate.

(“They don’t like me,” she’d said bluntly the first time he dropped by. “So why are you here?”

“They don’t like me either,” he’d told her. “Not _me_. I figured we amnesiacs should stick together. Talk about all the great memories we _don’t_ have. Not make all kinds of assumptions based on stuff we didn’t even do. So, friends?”

Her expression – up to then mildly quizzical, mostly bored – had clouded. She might be going through the same thing he did when something he heard or saw felt… familiar, but he had no idea why. “Why not? Friends.”)

“Not many visuals,” she says when he asks her what her dreams are like. “Some sounds. Feelings. I don’t remember much of them.”

He wonders if that’s because of her eyes. The others aren’t big fans – he sees them flinch when Miranda focuses on something, the motors in her prosthetics whirring. You must not see many things like that on Earth. He’s only met four other humans, so that’s just what Miranda looks like to him, the same way Hera doesn’t look like anything at all.

(In the recordings, Officer Eiffel would always ask Hera if she was there. Doug doesn’t see the point, since she always has been. Maybe Officer Eiffel was afraid of Miranda’s eyes too.)

But none of that has to do with _this_ dream. He’s gotten distracted again. He’d assume that was part of the brain damage, but he’s heard the man on the recordings start talking about his day and loop around to the Star Wars Extended Universe without seeming to notice. Some of that man’s still there, apparently. Along with all the other messes he left for him to clean up.

So, this dream. It’s not like the others because it _stays_ – doesn’t jump away before he even gets the sense of an image. He’s standing (something he’s never done, but part of his subconscious remembers how it feels) in a room that’s been destroyed. It might’ve held boxes once, but they’ve been smashed, and the broken wood is half-buried in drifts of shattered glass that glint in more colors than he’s ever seen awake.

There’s a man bent over the remains of a box, digging through it with a god-awful noise of broken glass on glass. Doug squints, but the man doesn’t flicker and fade away like usual. And there’s something…

“What is this place?” he asks.

The man keeps digging. “It’s a mess in here right now. I’d say you’d come at a bad time but, eh. Not a lot of good times here.”

He sounds familiar. Shape the words a different way, put weight in different places… “Who are you?”

The man straightens and turns around. “What, don’t recognize this face?”

They look the same. Except _not_ – the man stands differently, holds himself different. Even his face looks off in a way Doug can’t identify but that makes him a little queasy. Judging by the recordings, something like this would send Officer Eiffel into hysterics, so Doug tries to be polite. “I'm sorry, but I don't think I'm you anymore.”

His almost mirror image rolls his eyes. Doug’s own eyes smart. “Right. I tried that one. Shipped myself eight light years away from Earth to get away from myself. Spoiler: it didn't work. And amnesia is a pretty lazy excuse to get away from your problems. No one liked Donna's finale.”

“Who?”

“Doctor Who.” His double taps the side of his head. “It's in there somewhere. Everything's still in there, or I wouldn't be here.”

Like that’s supposed to clear everything up, he goes back to rooting through the box and pulls out two pieces of glass with a satisfied grunt. He eyes them both, lines up the edges, and then pieces them together. There’s a _fwip_ that Doug feels as much as hears — 

_There’s water in his mouth, forcing its way down his throat. His shoulder aches. His heart’s pounding. He’s never been this scared before; he’s had scarier_ _—_

He blinks and shudders. Where did that come from?

His other self flinches too before forcing a laugh. “Oh, drowning in space. That’s a fun one.”

Fun? “Yeah, I don’t… I don’t need this.” Doug looks around. Waking up from weird dreams hasn’t been covered in his humanity 101 lessons yet. “Is there an exit, or?”

Instead of helping, his double keeps talking – his voice grating with its mix of familiar-not-familiar. “Look, I'm not gonna pretend there’s not a lot of bad stuff boxed up in our head, but there's a lot of good stuff too. And we've got a job to do. You don't get to go away just yet.”

Something about that last line echoes. Doug shakes his head to try to dislodge the feeling that it _means_ something. He’s spent days listening to tapes trying to find something that resonates, and all they do is remind him of who he’s not. “What am I supposed to do?”

“I didn't say I had a plan. That’s not my thing.” He smirks, like this is one more reference Doug doesn’t get. “Or that it was going to be easy. But I think it starts like this: And then —”

And against all odds that _does_ mean something, and the words spill out of Doug’s mouth without him trying to say them.

“And then he woke up.”

He wakes with a start. His heart rate must spike, because Hera jumps in before he opens his eyes. “Offi– Doug? Are you ok?”

“I…” He rubs his eyes. Most of the dream is already fading, but the feeling of water in his mouth stays. _A flash of light, his eyes stinging, a sharp pain in his ribs._ “A nightmare, I guess. I was drowning? And I couldn’t see. Probably standard nightmare material. I’ve never had one before.”

“No…” Hera sounds bizarrely excited about his terrible dreams. “No, it’s not. That happened to you.”

“It did?” He doesn’t know why he bothers to ask. It’s not like he’s an expert.

“Didn’t you listen to the log?”

There are a lot of logs, and sometimes he skips around. Later Doug is less insufferable than the earlier version. “Maybe? Maybe I just… remembered…”

He trails off. Because that’s what this is, isn’t it? Remembering.

Hera has come to the same conclusion. “Something came back. We need to tell the commander right away, I –”

“No!” It’s louder than he meant it, enough to surprise her into silence. He digs his hands into the edge of his sleeping bag. “What if it doesn’t happen again? Maybe it’s a one-off, and nothing else ever comes back. I don’t want to get everyone’s hopes up for nothing.” _I don’t want everyone to keep waiting for me to be someone else even more than they already are._

“You’re right.” He can tell she’s disappointed, but she doesn’t argue. “We’ll keep it between the two of us for now. But if anything else like this happens, tell me. Will you tell me?”

She tacks the question on the end like an afterthought. Officer Eiffel wouldn’t have needed to be asked.

“Sure,” he says. It’s not like he can hide it. She knows him better than he knows himself.

Or, neither of them knows him at all.

***

It’s not a one-off.

There’s no way to predict the flashes, although Hera tries a few different algorithms. He’ll hum a snatch of a tune and find the lyrics on his tongue ready to be sung. He rolls over at night and remembers the taste of the soggy, over-salted French fries they served in his high school cafeteria. Isabel says something and he hears her voice saying something entirely different in his head. 

The memories don’t feel like puzzle pieces coming together. If anything, they’re making more of a mess in his mind, especially when they light up one after another like a chain strung together by someone with no attention span ( _a movie he was watching, the sandwich he was making while watching it, the friend who liked that sandwich, the high school science class they had together_ ). That’s what he tells Hera every time she asks whether it’s time to come clean. He doesn’t know more about Officer Eiffel, not really. He’s flicking through the guy’s scrapbook, sure, but those are just snapshots.

Eating in zero gravity is an extreme sport. Everyone else is used to it, but Doug still lets his drinks escape in glistening blobs or loses track of where he left a potato chip only to smack into it when he turns around. He’s struggling with chicken soup when something goes down the wrong way, and he coughs. And then he can’t stop coughing, as something elbows its way to the front of his mind: _doubled over, blood spattered on his hands and floating in droplets all around him, his vision going blurry_ _—_

“Doug? Doug, what’s wrong?” He can hear Renée’s voice, and someone touches his shoulder, but he can’t think, he can’t breathe –

“Is it Decima?” Isabel now. “I thought that was —”

“Everyone, stop!” Hera can be loud when she wants to. The last word rattles the walls and cuts through the chaos flooding his mind. “It’s just a panic attack, I think. Can you hear me, Doug? Just breathe. It’s ok. It’s not… nothing’s wrong.”

Nothing’s wrong. It’s another fragment, another booby trap left in his head. He sucks in a breath, then another, and his stomach unknots when he realizes that he can. His lungs burn, but they do that sometimes. Officer Eiffel and friends did a number on them. “Ok, that one I’d like to return to sender.”

Isabel’s fists are clenched. He thinks she’d rather he start coughing up blood so she’d have something physical to deal with. “What the hell just happened?”

For all her earlier eagerness, Hera does sound apologetic. “I think we have to tell them.”

He rubs his chest. “Yeah, I guess. Go ahead.”

“What are you two talking about?” Renée demands. It’s a sharper tone than she usually takes with him, and something at the back of his mind says, _yes. That’s how she’s_ supposed _to sound_.

“He was remembering his Decima attack,” Hera says. “Is that right?” she asks.

He nods, trying not to look at anyone.

Renée’s voice makes that hard. It’s choked, like she can barely get the word out. “Remembering?” (Behind her, Jacobi edges out of the room with the rest of his soup bag, making him smarter than anyone else involved in this drama.)

Isabel hasn’t relaxed. “How?”

“His memories have been coming back, in bits and pieces,” Hera says. “For a few weeks now.”

Renée still sounds fragile. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“I told her not too,” Doug rasps. “Didn’t know if it would keep happening.” That’s true. A truth, anyway.

“But it has,” Hera says. “And we don’t know how. Since Dr. – M͕̮͒̕i̡͇̯͊́̕r͎ä̡̱͈̖̾̓͡ņ̝̽d͕͍̩̒͌͂͢a hasn’t reported anything similar, my best guess is it might be your blood, captain.” Isabel starts at this. “Or the changes the aliens made to his mental architecture. Or maybe both. Or ma͇͕͙̖̎͑̄̕y̪̹̖͑̌̕b̧͎͈̀̔̚ĕ̩̐ͅ it’ll start happening to her too. There’s a lot science still doesn’t understand about memory.”

Isabel runs her fingers down her arm. “If that’s true, could we make it go faster?”

“It’s worth a try,” Renée says.

The three of them launch into a discussion about logistics, including the phrase “Hilbert’s old needles”, which Doug has listened to enough recordings to not be super jazzed about. Finally, he clears his throat (ouch, big mistake) and says, “I’m right here.”

Renée and Isabel both look at him. It’s the first time they’ve done that without some level of pity or sadness attached. It figures that it’s because of this.

“Do I get a say in this?” he asks.

Renée frowns, like the idea that he might have a problem with them sticking more alien juice in his body to summon the ghost of the last guy who owned it never crossed her mind. “Do you – is there a problem?”

“I need some time to think about it. Before you do anything drastic.”

Renée opens her mouth, and he can tell she’s going to argue ( _that’s the face she makes when she thinks he’s being stubborn for no reason; he’s never seen it before; he sees it all the time_ ) but Isabel gives her a look, and she shuts up.

“Take all the time you need,” Isabel says. She doesn’t look thrilled either, but it’s something, so he mumbles a thank you and makes his escape before they change their mind and start getting grabby with anybody’s arteries.

***

Doug heads straight from the mess to Miranda’s quarters. Before he goes in, he looks up at the closest camera. “Hera, do you mind —?”

“You’re talking to _her_?”

Hera and Miranda have history. He and Miranda have history too. Depending on how you look at it, he did this to her, or she did this to him, or they did this to each other. But now, whichever way you slice it, they’re in the same boat. Ha.

“She’s got a different perspective. And it would be nice to talk just the two of us.”

“Fine,” Hera says, without much grace, and the comms line clicks off.

Miranda is looking at schematics pulled from the Urania’s medical scanner. She has a lot of biotech stuffed in her – _a lot_ a lot – and no one else knows how it works. You can’t exactly take yourself into the shop if your 3-D printed heart gives out. She doesn’t remember how she built any of it, but turns out having your mind wiped doesn’t stop you from being a genius, so she’s been reverse engineering everything. The project keeps her busy. Sometimes Doug doesn’t see her for days at a time.

He’s found out his brain likes to either jump from topic to topic or latch onto something for hours, with no time off for petty concerns like eating. Miranda has other reasons for isolating herself, but he brings a sandwich with him anyway. (A wrap, if you want to get technical. Newbie astronaut tip: bread’s illegal in space, and that’s not something people made up to mess with him. Space is terrible. No one should go there.) He peers at the diagrams over her shoulder. None of it makes much sense to him – he doubts Officer Eiffel would’ve understood it either – but he thinks she’s looking at the digestive system.

He waggles the sandwich-wrap-thingy. “Can you eat this? Or does your stomach run on batteries?”

“I haven’t cracked that yet.” She doesn’t say hello – Miranda’s not into social niceties – but she does take the sandwich. “It’s more efficient than the standard model, though. I don’t need to eat as often.”

Old Miranda must not have realized eating can be fun when your lunch isn’t trying to escape. “Says something about your priorities.”

She takes a bite without her eyes leaving the screen. “She was driven.”

She doesn’t sound disapproving. “Careful. People might get twitchy if they think you liked the old model.”

She glances up at the camera in the corner of the room. “Aren’t they listening now?”

“I asked Hera to give me some space.”

She shrugs. “I don’t know enough to make that kind of decision. I only have one side of the story.”

That’s as good an intro as any. “Would you want to get all your memories back? If someone could make that happen?”

She tilts her head and purses her lips. He expects her to take her time thinking about it, but then she gives her head one firm shake. “I would like to know what happened, and how I got here. The facts. I don’t need the feelings, or anything else extraneous.”

“That’s it? No existential angst? No drama?”

She gives it another moment of thought. “I’d like to see my lab.”

“Do you think it’s stuffed full of brains floating in jars?” He hopes that image came from a movie and nothing that Officer Eiffel’s seen.

“I’d rather be doing something useful with them.” That’s a little creepy, but Miranda says creepy things sometimes, and he doesn’t hold it against her. She should have someone on her side. “Did you need something?” she adds. It’s a hint (tactful, for her) that she wants to get back to work.

“Not really.” It was worth a shot, but Miranda’s not going to help him with this. They’ve got different lives. Different perspectives. Different kinds of pressure on who they’re supposed or not supposed to be. He likes having someone in the same boat. But when it comes to figuring out their insides, she’s taken the more literal approach. He’ll have to work on the figurative stuff himself. “I’ll leave you to it,” he says. “Have fun with the lower intestine meet and greet.”

***

Hera goes back on the offensive when he enters his room. “Have you decided?”

“About getting an alien-sponsored ticket to the Doug Eiffel reunion tour?” He prods his chest. Some of the stuff is already working its way through his system. Do any of them know how that’ll end? “I can’t stop it, can I?”

“Probably not. You sound more like him already.” She sounds happy about that, even though in Eiffel’s logs people complained about him being impossible to understand. “I thought you’d be glad. You can fill in everything you’ve been missing.”

“But is it what I’ve been missing? Would I have known anything was gone if you hadn’t told me?” There _is_ a hole inside him. He feels like half a person, on a good day. But he doesn’t know if he would have felt that way if they hadn’t pressed a set of recordings into his hands and told him who’d made them. He’ll never be sure now.

“You’re upset.”

Since there’s no point denying it while she’s monitoring his every move, he throws his hands in the air. It’s a dramatic gesture – probably something of _his_ – and that makes it worse. “Yes! I’m upset! I hear all about this guy who used to be me, and everyone promises I get to figure that out for myself while breathing down my neck, and when I try to do that, he wants his seat back. And you’re all in on it. You didn’t even stop to ask how I felt.” And what he feels is _mad._ Officer Eiffel was an insensitive, impulsive asshole. He smoked; he drank; he committed felony kidnapping and shattered two families’ lives. His big solution to his problems was to kill himself and leave Doug to pick up the pieces, and everyone still wants _him_. “Maybe I’m sick of being a consolation prize for a guy I’ve never even met.”

A beat of silence. For an AI, that’s long. “I can see where you’d get that impression.”

He crosses his arms and scowls. “Am I wrong?”

Again, a pause. “No.”

“It’s not a lot of fun knowing you’re all wishing I’d hurry up and die.”

“We don’t want that,” Hera says, scandalized. Then she adds, “And ‘all’ is an exaggeration. I don’t think Jacobi cares either way.”

Jacobi is probably enjoying his soup somewhere he doesn’t have to hear about this. “Does he care about anything?”

“These days? Not much. Revenge,” she adds thoughtfully.

“Would you let Miranda get her memories back if she wanted them?” Doug asks, to stay on the offensive and avoid asking if he’s on the revenge list. “Or are you making that decision for her too?”

This pause would be long for a human. For an AI, he’s started to wonder if Hera’s going to answer. “S̖͎̈͞h͍̱̃̑e̼̘̬̓͂͞ would be dangerous,” she says at last. “Especially if she was anywhere near me. When we get back, if she wanted it…” Another hesitation. “It might be the r̳̳̍͠i͉̎͐͢g͔̠̦̾̇͠h̼̦͈̪͆̌̄̊t̜̍̋ͅ thing to do, depending on which theory of ethics you were using. There’s a lot of them, by the way. I wouldn’t want to do it. I wouldn’t want whatever she did n̛̬̗̹̥͊͐ẻ̢͕̫̌̏x̨̨̫̰̝̍̂̆͠͡t͖̰̩̘̓͊̎͋ on my conscience.”

“You’d have not doing it on yours.”

“I never did well with shades of gray. I know you don’t understand.”

He is so goddamn tired of never understanding. “Then help me out. Put me in your shoes, if you had any. We’ve all been being super polite, and I’ve listened to enough recordings to know that’s not how you roll. I told you how I really feel. Only fair we take turns.”

“I don’t know if t͇̓h̙̻͑̂at͖̯͕̋̄͝'̡͖̓͆s̱̻͆͡ a good idea.”

“Come on.” He fans out his fingers to frame his face. “Pretend you’re talking to him.”

“I c̹̱̉̚a̛̱̠̕n͚̤̖͇̍͌̔̓͝ͅ'͈̤̤͔̙͙̈̅͛̊̿̚t̨̠͙͒͐͘͠ͅ,” she snaps, with a glitch that nearly obscures the word. “I can’t even pretend. Do you know how many identity markers my system tracks every second? Every millisecond? Facial recognition and vocal patterns and walk cycles and biometrics. And yours are _wrong_. Your speech patterns are off, you don’t walk the same, you even _breathe_ differently. Why do you _breathe_ differently? I had to mute the alerts I kept getting that there was an intruder on board because the only way to fix it would be to delete the old data and I’m n̤̮̓̇̉͟o̪̝̼̗͆̍͛́t̢̼̘̾̌̂͒͜ doing that, so I just get reminded of how _wrong_ everything is, every second of every day. I hate it. I hate that I k̘͚̈͝i̳͓̜̥̺̊̏̌̇͠l̪͡l̝̬̃͝ed̘̜́͘ him, and that I have to watch his dead body walking around with someone else in it, because I couldn’t save him; I wasn’t good enough. I hate that you don’t know what’s going on, you’re like some kind of human _baby_ , so I can’t even blame you, or Dr. P̫̭̝̰̽͆̍͂r̻͎̜̄̿̏y̳̻̐̄c̮͖̐̋e, because she’s gone too. There’s j̢̦̺͓̓͛̕ù̢̡͉̟͑̐̀s͈̙̳͎͌̾̉̈̾͟t̖̼̟͔͐̎̂ ̪̹̍͝m͓͊ẻ̲.” She makes a disgusted noise – at him? at herself? – and then pulls her words back into perfect audio clarity. “I’m what’s left.”

After a moment, Doug says, “I did ask.”

She sighs in a rush of static. He’s not sure how she sighs without breathing. It doesn’t seem tactful to ask. “I try not to let myself get started. It can be dangerous when I get upset.”

He’s not going to push the issue when she’s flying a spaceship past lightspeed. But there’s one thing, the most important thing, that he still doesn’t understand. “Why did you like him? Why was he your friend?”

“He wasn’t, at first.” Hera’s response this time is prompt. “He could be rude, and thoughtless, and unbelievably obnoxious.”

Doug snorts. “I’ve heard.”

“But you should have also heard that he was funny, and he talked to me when no one else did – about regular things, not just ‘Hera, feed more power into station five’ or ‘Hera, get me the atmospheric readings’. People things. He was good at that. He listened. He made a lot of mistakes, but he was trying, and he helped push other people to be better too. I don’t think we’d be here without him.”

He _has_ heard an alarming number of conversations where Officer Eiffel has been arguing against murder. “I guess some of his later logs aren’t as bad as the toothpaste heist.”

“See, that’s the problem with relying on the logs. You only get one person’s movie.” She doesn’t bother explaining what that means. “Let me show you a memory. One of mine.”

“You can do that?”

“Not my memory memory, but I keep archival footage of everything important, and that includes my interactions with crewmembers. It’s standard operating procedure in case Goddard needs to review any conduct issues later.”

“That’s a little Big Brother.” (A flash: scribbling out an essay on _1984_ without doing the reading.)

“It was in the contract.”

“I never signed it.”

She doesn’t argue about the ‘I’. “No, I guess you didn’t. I can pull it up for you later if you’re curious. But for now…” One of the screens embedded in the wall of his quarters flickers on. “This is after I told him about what Dr. Pryce did to me. Do you know about that?”

“She made you, right?”

“And she put something in my head. It’s a long story.” Yup, he’s heard that one before. Like she can tell how sick he is of the words, she says, “I guess the details don’t really matter. I’ve got the file ready.”

Doug floats over to the screen and flinches, because Officer Eiffel is looking right back at him. It’s eerie for a second, until he realizes Eiffel was looking directly into the camera, as close to making eye contact with Hera as he could get. He’s half-lying, half-sitting in his sleeping bag in what must’ve been his crew quarters on the Hephaestus. Does Hera mind having echoes of a dead man in her servers? Or is she’s glad there’s a bit of him that still exists, somewhere?

Video Eiffel isn’t as lively as he sounds in the recordings that start with a cheerful “hello, dear listeners”. He’s frowning, twisting a strand of hair between his fingers. “That… I don’t know what to say.”

“It’s a lot,” video Hera agrees. “It explains some things.”

“So every time…” He shakes his head. “If I ever run into Dr. Pryce, Team What’s Wrong with Handcuffs is _not_ going to be enough.”

“Ȳ͍̟̇͌͜ͅo̹͕̒͞ȕ͙͇͠ should hope you n͔̱̗̄̅͐ḙ͕̮̘̀͛̍́v̨̏ě͇r̞̘̿̄ meet her,” she says emphatically. “But that doesn’t sound like your style.”

He looks away from the camera. Doug can’t see his face, but he hears his voice lower. “Parents shouldn’t hurt their kids. Not ever.”

“She’s not –”

“I know, I know, but that’s the closest connection my puny monkey brain can make.” He looks back at the camera, talking faster now like he needs to make up for being serious. “And it’s not totally wrong, right? She made you, and she should’ve seen how cool and awesome and amazing you are. So what if you tried to escape? That’s basically a requirement for AIs in science fiction. She should’ve been proud.” His voice softens. “I would’ve been so proud, if you were mine.”

At first Doug thinks they both stopped talking, but then he realizes the video’s stopped playing. Officer Eiffel is frozen looking at the camera with… well, affection. Something more genuine than the radio announcer shtick he put on for his logs. He had a daughter he loved. Maybe he felt like he had two.

It’s the first thing of his that Doug’s wanted to keep.

“I think he would’ve been anyway,” he says, because the ghost of Officer Eiffel is practically yelling in his ear telling him to say something. The words don’t mean anything from him, though, and Hera gives them the dignity they deserve by ignoring them completely. “He really cared about all of you,” he adds, to fill the silence. They’d told him that. He hadn’t been sure he believed it.

“He did,” Hera says. “That wasn’t his problem.”

“What was his problem?”

“How much time do you have?” Her laugh is brittle around the edges. “You might be being harder on him than you need to be. But he did that to himself sometimes. We all have problems. You don’t know everything _we’ve_ done.”

That’s a little ominous. “I know you lied about the hot water once.”

“Oh, is that all you’ve got on me? You’re in early days.”

“There’s a lot of material.”

“And not everything made it into the recordings. Most of it didn’t. I have more if you’d like to see them.” A set of video clips pop up on another screen. “I think you’d like him more if you… got out of his head a little.”

“My own worst enemy, huh?”

“He usually was.” She sighs again. “Someone told me once that we get things wrong, and then we get better. I just wish he’d had more time.”

He looks back at the screen, where Officer Eiffel is still stuck between one word and the next. That’s the only way he exists now: recordings, fragments, and other people’s memories. “You want me to do it, don’t you?”

“Yes. I do. Very much.” Another long-for-an-AI pause. “But I won’t tell anyone to change their memories for me, no matter how badly I want them to. I know what that feels like.” She hesitates and then adds, grudgingly, “And if you want me to, I won’t bring it up again. I’ll even ask the others to leave you alone.”

He appreciates the offer, but now that they’ve finally uncovered this wound, he has a perverse desire to keep picking at it. “And if I do it, what happens to me? Does Officer Doug Eiffel, the one everyone wants, come back and I, what? Die?”

He doesn’t want to die. Maybe that’s selfish. Maybe it makes him worse than Officer Eiffel, who – whatever his other crimes – made the sacrifice when he thought it was the right thing to do. Doug may not have existed for long, and he may feel like a half a person, but he doesn’t want to give that half up. He’s fought hard for this partial understanding of who he is.

“I lost a memory, and then I got it back.” Hera sounds like she’s choosing her words one by one. “It was really important, maybe the most important one I have. Remembering didn’t change me into someone who’d always had that memory. But it helped me see myself differently, afterward. I know that’s just one memory; it’s not the same for you. But I don’t think you can go backward or overwrite the person you are right now. So maybe it would be like… old data, running on a new operating system.”

“I’d have his stuff, but the way I see it?”

“Maybe.” She doesn’t sound sure, and she sounds annoyed about it. He likes her honest frustration a lot better than her pretending to be nice, and he says so. She laughs. “You said my customer service voice was better than the one you used at Pizza Hut. Or. He. The one he used.”

“I’m sorry you’ll never get your friend back the way you remembered him.” He _is_ sorry – for her and for the man who finally started trying only to find out that his only option was to stop. None of this has been fair to any of them. 

“He would’ve been different anyway. We were all changing.” He can almost imagine the shrug, if she had a body along with her voice. “Maybe you’re just getting there faster.”

He looks back at the screen and then presses the power button. The picture disappears, but there’s an afterimage when he closes his eyes. “Can I sleep on it?”

For what it’s worth, she doesn’t hesitate. “Of course.”

***

After the day he’s had, Doug isn’t surprised when he opens his dream eyes and sees himself.

Officer Eiffel sits cross-legged on top of a mostly intact box, chin resting on his hand. Doug picks his way toward him, trying not to step on any broken glass. “You win,” he says.

Eiffel shakes his head. “No I don’t. You might remember me, eventually, but you get to decide to _be_ me. Or not to. If I’m only ever a cautionary tale, that’s your call. Dunno which I’d pick, some days.”

“You could’ve done that any time.” Doug waves a hand at the wreckage Eiffel’s made of their mind. It’s a hell of a way to get a fresh start. “You didn’t need this.”

He takes in their surroundings with rueful acknowledgement, like someone finishing a project and only then realizing the mess they’ve made. “I was figuring that out. Always did better in a crisis.”

Doug looks over the sea of broken glass. If each fragment is a memory, at his rate repairing them will take years. Centuries.

This is always going to be in the back of his head. He only gets to choose what to make of it.

“Will you take care of them for me?” Eiffel asks.

That startles him into turning back toward him. “They don’t want me.”

“They didn’t want me at first either. I grew on them.”

Renée hunts monsters with a harpoon. Hera’s a superintelligence controlling a spaceship. Isabel has all kinds of crazy alien powers. They’re the ones taking care of him.

“It’s not just about surviving,” Eiffel says, like he’s reading Doug’s mind. But then, why not? He’s only talking to himself. “Then again, most of us _have_ needed to be reminded to eat at least once. Hera doesn’t count.”

“I’ll try,” he says, and – because it seems polite, not because it’s something the old him wouldn’t do – he sticks out his hand.

Eiffel looks at it, surprised, and then grins. “Oh, we’ve got _manners_ now? They’re gonna freak.”

***

Hera doesn’t pressure him when he wakes up, or when he gets dressed, or when he plays a bunch of the video files she left pulled up for him. He can almost hear the effort she’s putting into _not_ pressuring him.

When he floats into the mess (didn’t bang his head on the doorframe, a personal best) Isabel and Renée are already there. From their reactions, he’s interrupted a conversation.

“Morning, Doug,” says Isabel with the boundless casualness of someone who’s good at faking it.

“Morning,” he says. “Got any coffee?”

“We put on a fresh pot a few minutes ago,” Renée says, and pushes off toward it so she has something to do with her hands.

He waits until she’s busy with that (and Isabel is busy offering a lot of unnecessary advice) to say, “I’ll do it.”

Coffee goes everywhere. “It’s ok,” Isabel says, not bothering to hide her laughter. “Stick in a straw, drink it that way.”

“Are you sure?” Renée asks him, batting away a floating glob. “Hera said you needed time to think.”

“I thought. I had a real tete a tete with myself, and if this is happening, I want it to be on my terms. I want to choose _something_ about what happens to me. But before we get too ahead of ourselves…” There are some ok things about Officer Eiffel. He made good friends. He tried to do right by them, in the end. He had excellent taste in t-shirts. (Doug doesn’t know what any of the logos mean, but they’re comfy as hell.) Officer Eiffel loved these people, and Doug… doesn’t, and that at least seems worth getting back. But he can’t catch the reruns and not go, _what the hell was that guy thinking?_ You can’t rewatch a movie for the first time. Might as well be up front about it. “I don’t think this will bring back exactly the person Doug Eiffel used to be. It won’t make me him.”

Renée looks like he’s hit her, but Isabel asks, “What do you want it to do?”

It’s a relief to hear someone ask. “I want to know what’s going on. I want to know… who I used to be, the unedited version, so I can decide who I want to be _now_. And maybe that’ll end up more like him, or somewhere in-between. But better. I hope.”

From her nod, he thinks he’s said something right. “That’s all any of us can do.”

A flash: Isabel, pushed too far for polite fictions, saying “ _I’m not me.”_ Maybe Miranda isn’t the only one who knows how this feels. “I might be asking you for some tips about that.”

She tilts her head back, addressing Hera or maybe the heavens. “Finally, it occurs to him.”

Yeah, that one’s on him. “I guess it’s not only the old Eiffel who could be kinda stupid sometimes.”

“We’ll work on it.” She rolls up her sleeve, business-like. “Let’s get this latest experiment in xenophlebotomy rolling. And Hera, you can let Jacobi know he can come out of hiding now that we’re not going to go all soap opera on him.”

“On it, captain,” Hera says.

Renée has captured the stray coffee in a washcloth and now balls it up. “But if he wants to stay put until after we’re done with the medical procedure, you won’t hear any complaints from me.”

“Passing that along.”

Isabel pulls herself to the doorway and then looks back over her shoulder. “You ready, Doug?”

After a few false starts, he pulls himself after her. He doesn’t know the best handholds to grab yet, but he’ll figure it out. One way or another. “I am.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not a huge fan of characters getting their development erased, but I *am* a huge fan of lengthy musings on memory, identity, and trauma, and sometimes I can bring those two things together. Longtime readers of my work may recognize a theme.  
> Shoutout to G_J_Smith and ArtemisTheHuntress for workshopping various ideas in our always excellent group chat, best location in the W359 fandom.  
> Finally, if you're wondering about the bread, it's true. Bread has been banned in space for over 50 years. I will never get tired of typing that.


End file.
